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The African Development Corridors Database: a new tool to assess the impacts of infrastructure investments.

ABSTRACT: The large-scale expansion of built infrastructure is profoundly reshaping the geographies of Africa, generating lock-in patterns of development for future generations. Understanding the impact of these massive investments can allow development opportunities to be maximised and therefore be critical for attaining the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals and African Union's Agenda 2063 aims. However, until now information on the types, scope, and timing of investments, their evolution and spatial-temporal impact was dispersed amongst various agencies. We developed a database of 79 development corridors across Africa, synthesizing data from multiple sources covering 184 projects on railways, wet and dry ports, pipelines, airports, techno-cities, and industrial parks. The georeferenced interlinked tabular and spatial database includes 22 attributes. We expect this database will improve coordination, efficiency, monitoring, oversight, strategic planning, transparency, and risk assessments, among other uses for investment banks, governments, impact assessment practitioners, communities, conservationists, economists, and regional economic bodies.

SUBMITTER: Thorn JPR

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9646820 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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The African Development Corridors Database: a new tool to assess the impacts of infrastructure investments.

Thorn Jessica P R JPR Bignoli Diego Juffe DJ Mwangi Ben B Marchant Robert A RA

Scientific data 20221109 1

The large-scale expansion of built infrastructure is profoundly reshaping the geographies of Africa, generating lock-in patterns of development for future generations. Understanding the impact of these massive investments can allow development opportunities to be maximised and therefore be critical for attaining the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals and African Union's Agenda 2063 aims. However, until now information on the types, scope, and timing of investments, their evolution and ...[more]

PMID: 36351928

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Project description:Despite its importance, the field of human resources for health (HRH) has lagged in developing methods to measure its status and progress in low- and middle-income countries suffering a workforce crisis. Measures of professional health worker densities and distribution are purely numerical, unreliable, and do not represent the full spectrum of workers providing health services. To provide more information on the multi-dimensional characteristics of human resources for health, in 2013-2014, the global USAID-funded CapacityPlus project, led by IntraHealth International, developed and tested a 79-item HRH Effort Index modeled after the widely used Family Planning Effort Index.The index includes seven recognized HRH dimensions: Leadership and Advocacy; Policy and Governance; Finance; Education and Training; Recruitment, Distribution, and Retention; Human Resources Management; and Monitoring, Evaluation, and Information Systems. Each item is scored from 1 to 10 and scores are averaged with equal weights for each dimension and overall. The questionnaire is applied to knowledgeable informants from public, nongovernmental organization, and private sectors in each country. A pilot test among 49 respondents in Kenya and Nigeria provided useful information to improve, combine, and streamline questions. CapacityPlus applied the revised 50-item questionnaire in 2015 in Burkina Faso, Dominican Republic, Ghana, and Mali, among 92 respondents. Additionally, the index was applied subnationally in the Dominican Republic (16 respondents) and in a consensus-building meeting in Mali (43 respondents) after the national application.The results revealed a range of scores between 3.7 and 6.2 across dimensions, for overall scores between 4.8 and 5.5. Dimensions with lower scores included Recruitment, Distribution, and Retention, while Leadership and Advocacy had higher scores.The tool proved to be well understood and provided key qualitative information on the health workforce to assist in health systems strengthening. It is expected that subsequent applications should provide more information for comparison purposes, to refine aspects of the questionnaire and to correlate scores with measures of service outputs and outcomes.

Project description:BackgroundAlthough 80% of children with disabilities live in developing countries, there are few culturally appropriate developmental assessment tools available for these settings. Often tools from the West provide misleading findings in different cultural settings, where some items are unfamiliar and reference values are different from those of Western populations.Methods and findingsFollowing preliminary and qualitative studies, we produced a draft developmental assessment tool with 162 items in four domains of development. After face and content validity testing and piloting, we expanded the draft tool to 185 items. We then assessed 1,426 normal rural children aged 0-6 y from rural Malawi and derived age-standardized norms for all items. We examined performance of items using logistic regression and reliability using kappa statistics. We then considered all items at a consensus meeting and removed those performing badly and those that were unnecessary or difficult to administer, leaving 136 items in the final Malawi Developmental Assessment Tool (MDAT). We validated the tool by comparing age-matched normal children with those with malnutrition (120) and neurodisabilities (80). Reliability was good for items remaining with 94%-100% of items scoring kappas >0.4 for interobserver immediate, delayed, and intra-observer testing. We demonstrated significant differences in overall mean scores (and individual domain scores) for children with neurodisabilities (35 versus 99 [p<0.001]) when compared to normal children. Using a pass/fail technique similar to the Denver II, 3% of children with neurodisabilities passed in comparison to 82% of normal children, demonstrating good sensitivity (97%) and specificity (82%). Overall mean scores of children with malnutrition (weight for height <80%) were also significantly different from scores of normal controls (62.5 versus 77.4 [p<0.001]); scores in the separate domains, excluding social development, also differed between malnourished children and controls. In terms of pass/fail, 28% of malnourished children versus 94% of controls passed the test overall.ConclusionsA culturally relevant developmental assessment tool, the MDAT, has been created for use in African settings and shows good reliability, validity, and sensitivity for identification of children with neurodisabilities.

Project description:BackgroundOne of the factors affecting self-care in diabetic patients is food literacy, which helps said patients in following a healthy diet. Thus, it is crucial to analyze food literacy in diabetic patients through suitable and reliable instruments. OBJECTIVE: The current study aimed to design a questionnaire for food literacy assessment in diabetic patients and analyze its psychometric features.MethodThe present study was a cross-sectional descriptive analysis carried out in 2021. Firstly, the concepts of food literacy in diabetic patients were identified and the questionnaire was deigned based on them. Secondly, its face and content validities and its reliability were analyzed. Finally, the construct validity was analyzed by exploratory factor analysis. The study was carried out on 300 diabetic participants chosen at random via stratified cluster sampling from Health service centers. The exploratory factor analysis was carried out by extracting the main factors and using varimax rotation with eigenvalue values more than 1.ResultsA five-pronged structure accounted for 52.745% of food literacy variance. This included the ability to read food facts, practical ability to group foods, the ability to identify the caloric content of different foods, the ability to understand the effect of food on health, and the ability to prepare a healthy meal. Items with an impact score below 1.5 were discarded. Additionally, items with CVR scores below 0.62 and CVI scores below 0.79 were deleted too. The Kaiser-Meyer-Okin measurement was 0.836 (p < 0.001). Alpha Cronbach Scale dimension was 0.610-0.951.ConclusionThe results of this study showed that the exploratory dimensions of the current study were consistent with health literacy measurements, such as functional, interactive, and critical food literacy. This scale has acceptable reliability and validity. Health professionals can use this scale to analyze and improve food literacy in diabetic patients. This is a new instrument and thus far no questionnaire has been made to evaluate food literacy in diabetic patients.

Dataset Information

The African Development Corridors Database: a new tool to assess the impacts of infrastructure investments.

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The African Development Corridors Database: a new tool to assess the impacts of infrastructure investments.

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